Breaking – 7 Quick Facts To Know About Asteroids

From a variety of sources, s could easily refer to the minor planets of the inner Solar System, including those co-orbital with Jupiter.

There exist millions of asteroids, many the shattered remnants of planetesimals, bodies within the young Sun’s solar nebula that never grew large enough to become planets.

Here are 7 other quick facts about asteroids:

1. Asteroids are rocky objects primarily found in the asteroid belt, a region of the solar system that lies more than 2 ½ times as far from the Sun as Earth does, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
2. Asteroids sometimes called minor planets or planetoids, and are regarded as leftovers from the early formation of the solar system.
3. The composition of asteroids helps to shed light on what the early solar system was like, being probably formed from the protoplanetary disk that surrounded the Sun but never had enough mass to form into the roughly spherical shape required to be considered a planet.
4. Despite thousands having been discovered, their total collective mass is still far less than the mass of the Earth.
5. Some authorities have also described asteroids as meteoroids’ big cousins that range in size from 1 meter to larger than 100,000 meters, whereas meteoroids are generally smaller than 1 meter in diameter, but they are made from the same rocky or metallic materials.
6. Asteroids that fall into the category of Near Earth Objects have orbits that bring them in close proximity with our planet, and a number of notable impact sites have been attributed to asteroids.
7. Most famously, the Chicxulub crater under the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico is the result of an asteroid impact that might have wiped out the dinosaurs. Another asteroid known as Tunguska didn’t impact Earth, but exploded a few miles above the Podkamennaya Tunguska River on June 30,1908.

Source: Wikipedia, Spaceplace